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Bernie obviously wasn't a Condorcet winner even among Democrat primary voter preferences, and probably would have done even more poorly in a general election, sure. But the non-creepy-to-the-public solution to this problem is to switch to an election method that's more clone-proof, not to get all the clones in a smoke-filled back room together to play "draw the short straw" or whatever. (As a point of fact I dispute the collusion interpretation in this particular case - Klobuchar was getting creamed when she dropped out, Buttigieg too, and Warren was getting creamed well before she dropped out - but in theory "Deciding not to let the less popular candidate win" can be a good sort of strategy to collude on in a plurality race, if only you don't mind how creepy it is to see collusion in an election.)
They're not going to switch, partly because even the people who try to improve election methods these days don't seem to be very smart about it (IRV is only one form of RCV, and it's not clone-proof either), and partly because any party insiders who are smart about election methods are probably smart enough to realize that escaping Duverger's law is a bad thing for political party insiders.
But making people sit through these sorts of weird "your favorite candidate dropped out before you even got a chance to vote" races is still a self-inflicted wound. If you put Democracy in the very name of your party, you're signing a "we'll be good at democracy" check that you'd better not bounce. The drop-out-when-you're-losing-badly system and even the smoke-filled-back-room system are probably improvements over plurality voting at democracy's job of trying to pick a good leader (though in hindsight it's hard to see how they could have done much worse), but they're not an improvement over plurality at democracy's equally-critical job of convincing your voters that they were the ones who picked the leader.
Imagine what the primary could have looked like under approval voting. Plurality's "Buttigieg dropped out before 46 states could vote because Biden had nearly half of South Carolina's voters" kinda looks pathetic, doesn't it? Even if the final outcome were unchanged, "Buttigieg stayed in until the end, but he only had 70% approval and Biden had 80%" would have been much more inspiring statistics. It's arguable whether we can do that in a general election without a constitutional amendment, but a party can do whatever weird superdelegate shit they want in the primary, and they ought to be able to make their primary better too.
I do agree that another voting system might be useful but it's not even the first past the post thing, it's also that they do every state in sequence. It's actually pretty hard to design a system around this kind of thing, especially because the primary isn't just about the voting but had also kind of morphed into a narrative building function. If you get rid of them and ran it all at once then you'd have the campaigns be very driven by polling which has its own problems.
Switching voting systems would help a little bit with the issues with sequencing too. Right now, typically a handful of states decide which handful of a large candidate pack are "serious candidates" for Super Tuesday, Super Tuesday knocks it down to 2, and everybody else just gets to pick between those 2. With something like approval, the ordering of votes still matters (because you still have to vote tactically, and what that means depends on who the front-runners are), but it can be hard to impossible for an earlier state to "knock out" a candidate who's more popular in a later state. If the race's narrative and polling all looks like it's A vs B, but everybody in your state would prefer C, with plurality it's not safe to vote for C unless you don't have a preference between A and B, but with approval you can turn your A vote into an {A,C} vote without risking getting B elected, your opponents can turn your B vote into a {B,C} vote without risking getting A elected, and C can actually win.
On the other hand, running a campaign is expensive. If the early states like A and B, but later states would prefer C, even if you have enough C voters to make C the winner, you have to hope that C knows this and is willing to risk the expense of waiting on all of you. You're right that everything would be driven by polling.
What we ought to have is an app where everyone ranks the field from day 1 of the campaign and can change at any point. Then we could get real time feedback on messaging. Of course the end problem is even if you were made godking of the docratic party you still have to implement a system like this where 95 year olds who can't handle technology more complicated than a television remote or deal wit the disengenuous claim that poor black people don't have cell phones.
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